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Death of Laurence Ginnell, Politician, Lawyer & Member of Parliament

Laurence Ginnell, Irish nationalist politician, lawyer and Member of Parliament (MP) of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, dies in the United States on April 17, 1923. He serves as member of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) for North Westmeath at the 1906 United Kingdom general election. From 1910 he sits as an Independent Nationalist and at the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland he is elected for Sinn Féin.

Ginnell is born in Delvin, County Westmeath, in 1852, (baptised April 9, 1852) the son of Laurence Ginnell and Mary Monaghan and twin to Michael Ginnell. He is self-educated and is called to the Irish bar as well as the Bar of England and Wales. In his youth, he is involved with the Land War and acts as private secretary to John Dillon.

The last great social and agrarian campaign of the Irish home rule movement, the Ranch War (1906 and 1909), is largely led and organised by Ginnell from the central office of the United Irish League. He is elected an MP in 1906, takes his seat at Westminster and swears allegiance to Edward VII. On October 14, 1906, he launches the “war” at Downs, County Westmeath.

The purpose of the war is to bring relief to the large numbers of landless and smallholders, particularly in the West, who are relatively untouched by the Wyndham Land Act (1903) and by the larger policy of purchase. The strategy that Ginnell pursues is the Down’s Policy, or cattle driving, a proceeding designed to harass the prosperous grazier interests, whose “ranches” occupy large, under populated and under worked tracts. The Down’s Policy is also meant to draw public attention to the scandalous inequalities that survive in the Irish countryside. The conservatives within the home rule leadership are understandably suspicious about the revival of agrarian disturbances, but the mood of the party organisation is hardening in the aftermath of a disappointing devolution bill in May 1907, from the new Liberal government, so that it seems logical to turn to the traditional mechanism for reactivating the national question: agrarian agitation.

Ginnell’s cattle drives begin to tail off after the summer of 1908, and the agitation is finally dissolved with the passage of a 1909 Act by the Liberal Chief Secretary Augustine Birrell that allows the transfer to the Irish Land Commission of farmland by compulsory purchase, which is hailed by the national movement as an historic victory. In reality, the Ranch War involves an implosion within sectors of the Irish Parliamentary Party, as its leadership has not facilitated the working of the Wyndham Land Act in the first place because John Dillon and his like want conflict above victory.

In 1909, Ginnell is expelled from the Irish Parliamentary Party for the offence of asking to see the party accounts after which he sits as an Independent Nationalist. During this time, he is addressed frequently as “The MP for Ireland.” At Westminster, he is highly critical of the British government‘s war policy and its holding of executions of certain participants in the Easter Rising of 1916. On May 9, he accuses British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, of “Murder” and is forcibly ejected from the Chamber. He visits many of the prisoners who are interned in various prisons in Wales and England.

In 1917, Ginnell campaigns to try to ensure the election of George Noble Plunkett in the North Roscommon by-election in which he defeats the IPP candidate on an abstentionist platform. Following the victory of Éamon de Valera in East Clare, while he is standing for Sinn Féin, on July 10, 1917, Ginnell joins Sinn Féin.

At the Sinn Féin ardfheis in 1917, at which the party is reconstituted as a republican party with de Valera as president, Ginnell and W. T. Cosgrave are elected Honorary Treasurers. He is imprisoned in March 1918 for encouraging land agitation and later deported to Reading Gaol. In the 1918 United Kingdom general election, he is elected as a Sinn Féin MP for the Westmeath constituency by comfortably defeating his IPP challenger. After his release from prison, he attends the proceedings of the First Dáil. Along with fellow TD James O’Mara, he is one of the only TDs to serve as a member in both the House of Commons and Dáil Éireann.

He is one of the few people to have served in the House of Commons and in the Oireachtas. He is appointed Director of Propaganda in the Second Ministry of the Irish Republic. After spending a year as a republican campaigner in Chicago, he is appointed the Representative of the Irish Republic in Argentina and South America by de Valera. He carries out his propaganda work here to distribute copies of the Irish Bulletin and to provide the Sinn Féin version of the conflict during the Irish War of Independence. On August 16, 1921, he returns home to attend the first meeting of the Second Dáil. He travels back to Argentina some months later to serve as the Representative of the Republic there.

Ginnell opposes the Anglo-Irish Treaty that is ratified by the Dáil in January 1922, and is elected as an anti-Treaty Sinn Féin TD at the 1922 Irish general election on the eve of the Irish Civil War.

On September 9, 1922, Ginnell is the only anti-Treaty TD to attend the inaugural meeting of the Provisional Parliament or Third Dáil. Before signing the roll, he says, “I want some explanation before I sign. I have been elected in pursuance of a decree by Dáil Éireann, which decree embodies the decree of May 20, 1922. I have heard nothing read in reference to that decree, nothing but an Act of a foreign Parliament. I have been elected as a member of Dáil Éireann. I have not been elected to attend any such Parliament. Will anyone tell me with authority whether it is…”.

Ginnell is at this point interrupted but resumes by saying that he will sign the roll and take his seat in the Assembly if the Assembly is Dáil Éireann. He is informed he is not allowed raise any such question until a Ceann Comhairle has been elected. He continues to ask questions regardless to which he gets no answer including his question: “Will any member of the Six Counties be allowed to sit in this Dáil?” W. T. Cosgrave moves at this point that he be excluded from the House. Ginnell protests, and he is dragged out by force.

De Valera later appoints Ginnell a member of his “Council of State,” a twelve-member body set up to advise him on the deteriorating situation in the civil war. He returns to the United States soon afterward to serve as the Republic‘s envoy in the country. He orders Robert Briscoe and some of his friends to take possession of the Consular Offices in Nassau Street, New York City, then in the hands of the Irish Free State Government, to obtain the list of the subscribers to the bond drive organized to aid the struggle in the War of Independence. At the time, a court case is ongoing to decide on who has the right to the funds: the newly installed Provisional Government or de Valera, as one of the three trustees among the anti-Treatyites.

Ginnell dies in Washington, D.C. on April 17, 1923, at the age of 71, still campaigning against the Anglo-Irish Treaty.


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Birth of Gaetano Alibrandi, Papal Nuncio to Ireland

Gaetano Alibrandi, a senior papal diplomat of the Catholic Church and former Personal Secretary to Giovanni Battista Cardinal Montini (later Pope Paul VI), is born on January 14, 1914, at Castiglione di Sicilia in the province of Catania, Sicily.

Alibrandi is ordained priest on November 1, 1936, and obtains a Doctor of Divinity from the Pontifical Lateran University and a Doctorate on Civil and Canon Law. He enters the Diplomatic Corps of the Holy See in 1941, serving for five years in the Vatican Secretariat of State and is then a staff member in the apostolic nunciatures in Italy and Turkey before coming to Ireland as a counsellor at the Apostolic Nunciature for two years from 1954 to 1956. He later describes his first Irish posting as “a spiritual bath.”

In 1961, Alibrandi receives episcopal consecration as titular Archbishop of Binda by Cardinal Fernando Cento upon his appointment as Nuncio of Chile, followed quickly by similar appointments in Lebanon (1963). As Apostolic Nuncio to Chile, he leads the Chilean delegation to the Second Vatican Council.

Alibrandi is appointed Papal Nuncio to Ireland on April 19, 1969, shortly after the outbreak of the Troubles. 

This is a challenging time for the Catholic Church in Ireland, then led by Cardinal William Conway, as it adjusts to both the internal changes generated by the Second Vatican Council and the wider social changes. He is ill-suited to coping with these changes and in particular the violence in Northern Ireland. It is widely assumed that he sees to it that the more overtly nationalist Tomás Ó Fiaich is appointed to Armagh in 1977 after the death of Cardinal Conway. The journalist and author Ed Moloney in his book on the Irish Republican Army (IRA) asserts that Alibrandi’s “sympathy for the IRA was a constant source of friction with the government in London.”

Alibrani plays a major role in the 1971 decision by the Vatican to accept the resignation of John Charles McQuaid as Archbishop of Dublin. This comes as a shock to McQuaid, who expected that he would be allowed to remain for some time after the normal retirement age of 75.

In many of the episcopal appointments made while Alibrandi is nuncio, he favours doctrinally “sound,” right-of-centre priests and in the case of the Archdiocese of Dublin picks two priests, Kevin McNamara and Desmond Connell, who are notably ill-suited. In a profile of the Archbishop at the time of his retirement, T. P. O’Mahony observes in The Tablet, “although he rarely gave interviews, and never overtly intervened in policy-making or in public controversies, it is beyond dispute that Archbishop Alibrandi wielded considerable influence behind the scenes.”

The respected academic and church historian Dermot Keogh assessing this period argues that “there was a general view that the best candidates had not been appointed…that a number were not up to the job, that most of the appointees shared a defensive attitude to matters of church and state.”

Alibrandi has “a very testy relationship with three Taoisigh – Jack Lynch, Liam Cosgrave and Garret FitzGerald.” After reaching the retirement age of 75, he returns to his home town in Sicily where he dies on July 3, 2003. His funeral Mass was celebrated on Saturday in Castiglione di Sicilia by Archbishop Paolo Romeo, Apostolic Nuncio to Italy. A memorial Mass for Archbishop Alibrandi will be celebrated by Archbishop Giuseppe Lazzarotto, Apostolic Nuncio to Ireland, on Friday, 11 July at 19.30 in the Church of Our Lady Help of Christians, Navan Road, Dublin.

It is reported in September 2012 during the second Dr. Garret FitzGerald Memorial Lecture at University College Cork (UCC) by Seán Donlon, former secretary general at the Department of Foreign Affairs, that “It came to our [Department of Foreign Affairs] attention that a substantial amount in three bank accounts in Dublin [held by the archbishop] were way in excess of what was needed to run the nunciature. The source [of the money] appeared to be South America.” Donlon goes on to say, “Because of its size, we thought it appropriate to ask if the funds belonged to the Holy See.” When contacted for an answer, Alibrandi “quickly answered ‘no’ and that they belonged to ‘family’. When it was pointed out to him that the money was then liable under Irish taxation law to DIRT, he said he would retire shortly and the accounts would be closed.”


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Death of David Bailie Warden, United Irishman & Diplomat

David Bailie Warden, United Irishman, diplomat, and bibliographer, dies in Paris on October 9, 1845, where he had lived for the previous thirty-eight years.

Warden is born in the townland of Ballycastle, near Newtownards in County Down, the eldest among three sons of Robert Warden, tenant farmer, and Elizabeth Warden (née Bailie). Educated locally, he studies for the Presbyterian ministry, despite being told by a clergyman that he is a “blockhead.” Entering the University of Glasgow, he wins a silver medal for his work on barometers, receives a certificate in midwifery, and graduates MA in April 1797. Returning to Ireland, he accepts a provisional license to preach from the Presbytery of Bangor, County Down, and becomes a popular preacher in the region. A patriot in politics, he joins the United Irishmen. Because of this a warrant was issued for his arrest in 1798 and he surrenders himself to the government. Banished from Ireland, he decides to emigrate to the United States and writes a pamphlet explaining his decision, A farewell address to the junto of the presbytery of Bangor, in which he accuses the church leaders of “meanness, injustice and cruelty.”

On his arrival in New York City in 1799, Warden decides to abandon his career as a clergyman and become a teacher. Interested in mathematics, science and literature, he becomes principal of the Columbia Academy in Kinderhook, New York, and is appointed in 1801 the head tutor at Kingston Academy in Ulster County, New York. Employed by General John Armstrong, Jr. to teach his children, he makes useful connections in American society. He becomes a citizen in 1804 and is asked to accompany Armstrong to France when he is appointed ambassador. Arriving in Paris in 1806, he gives strong support to Armstrong and defends him from criticism in the American press. He is appointed acting consul in 1808, and serves as head of the legation on two occasions when Armstrong is absent. Surprisingly, despite their ties of friendship, Armstrong does not recommend Warden to succeed him permanently, and advises President Thomas Jefferson that although “honest and amiable” he is “not well qualified for business.” Stung by these comments, Warden reacts angrily and his friendship with Armstrong ends acrimoniously. As a result he is swiftly recalled from Paris.

Once back in America, Warden lobbies vigorously to be appointed French consul. Supported by Jefferson, now out of office, he returns to Paris in August 1811 having convinced the government of his credentials. Befriending the new ambassador, Joel Barlow, he soon allows pride to get the better of him. Arrogantly styling himself “consul general” after Barlow dies in December 1812, he provokes much anger and is dismissed from office on June 10, 1814. He never holds a diplomatic appointment again.

Deciding to remain in France, he resumes his scholarly activities and publishes his first book, On the Origin, Nature, Progress and Influence of Consular Establishments in 1813. A friend of many of the leading French writers and intellectuals, he also offers assistance to visiting scholars from America, providing a bridge between the European and American intellectual communities. His reputation increases with the publication of Chorographical and Statistical Description of the District of Columbia (1816) and A Statistical, Political and Historical Account of the United States of North America (3 vols., 1819). The publishers of a series, L’art de vérifier les dates, commissions him to research the volumes on North and South America in 1821. These run to ten volumes and are written over thirteen years.

Beset by financial difficulties, Warden is twice forced to sell part of his vast library to raise money. He dies on October 9, 1845, in Paris, after a long illness. He never marries.

(From: “Warden, David Bailie” by Patrick M. Geoghegan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Birth of Desmond Boal, Unionist Politician & Barrister

Desmond Norman Orr Boal, unionist politician and barrister, is born on August 8, 1928, in St. Columb’s Court, Derry, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland.

Boal is the third of five children (and only son) of James Boal, cashier and bakery manager, and his wife Kathleen (nèe Walker). Brought up in the Church of Ireland, he is educated at First Derry Primary School, Cathedral Primary School (Derry), Foyle College (Derry), Portora Royal School In Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, and Trinity College Dublin (TCD), where he graduates BA and Bachelor of Laws (LLB).

During his studies Boal founds an Orange lodge at TCD. He is called to the bar in 1952 at the Inner Temple, London. He travels extensively during his summers, visiting Afghanistan, South America and even China during the Cultural Revolution.

Around 1956, Boal makes the acquaintance of Ian Paisley through friendships with ultra-protestant activists, and for the next half-century is one of Paisley’s closest friends and advisers. He has a legal career before he enters politics in 1960. He was the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) Member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland for the Belfast Shankill constituency between 1960 and 1972. He is very critical of the leadership under Captain Terence O’Neill, then Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. He opposes the manner, if not the substance, of O’Neill’s attempts at improving relations with both the Irish government and the Roman Catholic/Irish nationalist minority in Northern Ireland, along with many backbenchers.

Discontented with James Chichester-Clark and Brian Faulkner who come to government after O’Neill’s 1969 fall from power, Boal resigns from the UUP in 1971 and joins Ian Paisley in establishing the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in order to provide dissident unionist opinion with a viable political alternative. He works as the first chairman and one of the first public representatives of the DUP and continues to sit in Stormont during the years of 1971–1972. He later resumes his practice as a barrister.

While Boal’s interest in federalism diminishes after the 1970s, the federalist Boal scheme of January 1974 is again put forward by liberal protestants such as John Robb as late as 2007. His friendship with Paisley finally breaks when the DUP agrees to enter government with Sinn Féin in 2007. He tells Paisley, who takes the breach very hard, that he had betrayed everything he ever advocated.

Boal dies at his home in Holywood, County Down, on April 23, 2015, aged 86. His funeral is held at Roselawn Crematorium in Belfast.


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Death of Sir Denis Pack, British Army General

Sir Denis Pack, British Army major general who serves in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, dies in London on July 24, 1823.

Pack is born on October 7, 1775 in Kilkenny, County Kilkenny, the younger son of Rev. Thomas Pack, Dean of Ossory, and Catherine Pack (née Sullivan), of St. Andrew’s parish, Dublin. In June 1790, he enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD), aged 15, but does not take his degree. His elder brother, Thomas Pack, previously attends TCD, but dies in December 1786.

Pack enters the army in November 1791, being commissioned as a cornet in the 14th Light Dragoons, and serves with this regiment in Flanders in 1794 as part of Francis Rawdon-Hastings‘s expedition. Transferring to the 8th Light Dragoons, he is promoted to lieutenant In March 1795 and takes part in the expedition to Quiberon Bay. He is promoted to captain in February 1796 and serves with the 5th Dragoon Guards in Ireland during the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Promoted to major In August 1798, he is attached to the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards, and after the surrender of the French expeditionary force at Ballinamuck, County Longford, on September 8, 1798 he commands the troops that escort General Jean Joseph Amable Humbert and the other French officers to Dublin.

Promoted to lieutenant colonel in December 1800, Pack commands the 71st (Highland) Regiment of Foot and takes part in the expedition to the Cape of Good Hope in 1806. He then takes part in General John Whitelocke‘s expedition to South America and is captured after an unsuccessful attack on Montevideo. His fellow-prisoner is William Carr Beresford, later 1st Viscount Beresford, and the two men remain friends for the rest of their lives. Refusing to give their parole to General Santiago de Liniers, they escape from La Plata in a boat, meeting a British cruiser at sea. Pack later takes part in the successful attack on Montevideo on February 9, 1807.

Pack is posted to Portugal in 1808 and is present at the Battle of Roliça on August 17 and the Battle of Vimeiro on August 21. In 1809, he takes part in the Walcheren Campaign and, promoted to colonel in July 1810, he is made aide-de-camp to George III. Returning to Portugal in 1810, he serves under Beresford, commanding a Portuguese brigade, and takes part in the Battle of Bussaco on September 27, 1810. Promoted to brigadier general in January 1812, he takes part in the Siege of Ciudad Rodrigo and is present at the Battle of Salamanca on July 22, 1812. In June 1813, he is promoted to major general and later is present at the battles of Vitoria (June 21, 1813), Nivelle (November 10, 1813), Nive (December 10-13, 1813), Orthez (February 27, 1814) and the final French defeat at Toulouse (April 10, 1814). In January 1815, he is made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in recognition of his services in the Peninsula.

During the Waterloo campaign of 1815, Pack commands one of the brigades in General Sir Thomas Picton‘s division. Present at the Battle of Quatre Bras (June 16, 1815), he plays a prominent part in the Battle of Waterloo, bringing his brigade forward at a crucial moment to stop the advance of the French 3rd Division under General Pierre-Louis Binet de Marcognet. During the course of his career he is wounded several times and is awarded numerous honours including the Peninsular Gold Cross (with seven clasps), the Military Order of the Tower and Sword (Portugal) and the Order of Saint Vladimir (Russia). In 1819, he is appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Plymouth, and is later made honorary colonel of the 84th (York and Lancaster) Regiment of Foot in 1822.

In July 1816, Pack marries Lady Elizabeth Louisa de la Poer Beresford, daughter of George Beresford, 1st Marquess of Waterford. They have two sons and two daughters. His descendants adopted “Pack-Beresford” as their family name. He dies on July 24, 1823, at Lord Beresford’s house in Upper Wimpole Street, London. A monument to him is later erected in St. Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny. A portrait by G. L. Saunders is in family possession; another by Charles Turner, showing Pack wearing his numerous orders and decorations, is in the National Portrait Gallery, London. A collection of his papers is held by the University of Southampton.


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Birth of William Brown, Commander in the Argentine Navy

William Brown, Irish sailor, merchant, and naval commander who serves in the Argentine Navy during the wars of the early 19th century, is born on June 22, 1777, in Foxford, County Mayo. He is also known in Spanish as Guillermo Brown or Almirante Brown.

Comparatively little is known of his early life, and it has been suggested that he was illegitimate and took his mother’s surname and that his father’s surname was actually Gannon. He emigrates with his father to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1793, eventually settling in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A short time after their arrival, the friend who had invited them and offered them food and hospitality dies of yellow fever. Several days later, his father also succumbs to the same disease.

One morning, while Brown is wandering along the banks of the Delaware River, he meets the captain of a ship then moored in port. The captain inquires if he wants employment and Brown agrees. The captain engages him as a cabin boy, thereby setting him on the naval promotion ladder, where he works his way to the captaincy of a merchant ship. After ten years at sea, where he develops his skills as a sailor and reaches the rank of captain, Brown is press-ganged into a Royal Navy warship. British impressment of American sailors is one of the primary issues leading to the War of 1812.

During the Napoleonic Wars, Brown escapes the ship he is serving on, a galley, and scuttles the vessel. However, the French do not believe he had assisted them and imprison him in Lorient. On being transferred to Metz, he escapes, disguised in a French officer’s uniform. However, he is recaptured and is imprisoned in the fortress of Verdun. In 1809, he escapes from there in the company of a British Army officer named Clutchwell, and eventually reaches German territory.

Returning to England, Brown renounces his maritime career and on July 29, 1809, he marries Elizabeth Chitty, daughter of an English shipping magnate, in Kent. As he is a Catholic and she a Protestant, they agree to raise their sons as Catholics and their daughters as Protestants. Despite lengthy periods of enforced separation, they have nine children. He leaves the same year for the Río de la Plata on board Belmond and sets himself up as a merchant in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Late in 1811 Brown settles in Buenos Aires just as a criollo rebellion against Spanish colonial rule in Argentina is gaining strength. By April 1812, he is developing a coastal shipping business in fruit and hides. As the Spanish naval blockade of 1812–14 begins to choke trade, he is first commissioned by the patriot government as a privateer licensed to raid Spanish merchantmen, and then, on March 1, 1814, invited to take charge of a small rebel naval squadron to contest Spanish control of the Río de la Plata estuary. Leading a fleet of nineteen ships, he fixes with great speed on a set of wartime naval routines and signaling methods, and organises a system of discipline, founding the navy on principles that pay exceptional attention to the welfare of ordinary seamen.

In early March 1814, Brown shows personal courage and incisive skill in outwitting and defeating a more powerful Spanish force near Martín García Island, thereby dividing the Spanish blockade. A Spanish attempt in May 1814 to break his blockade of Montevideo is decisively crushed by him and his makeshift navy, and the Spanish strongholds on the Atlantic coast collapse, ending open war. In 1815 and 1816, however, he carries out skirmishing raids on military and commercial targets belonging to Spanish South American possessions, until detained by a British colonial governor in Barbados in July 1816 for alleged infringements of international rules of trade.

Illness, and a tortuous but ultimately successful appeal process, take up most of 1817–18, but when Brown returns to Argentina in October 1818, political enemies set in motion a prosecution for alleged disobedience of orders. Cashiered in August 1819, then restored in rank but forced to retire, he attempts suicide the following month. Convalescence and resumption of his trading concern occupies him for several years.

A repentant government renews Brown’s command of the navy in December 1825, when war breaks out with Brazil. Though vastly outnumbered by the Brazilian fleet, he shows audacity and great finesse in a number of successful engagements in the Plate estuary in 1826, roving up the Brazilian coast on occasion to create great confusion. In February 1827, he triumphs in a series of actions known as the Battle of Juncal. After another year of commercial privateering against the Brazilian merchant fleet, he is one of two delegates selected to sign peace terms with Brazil in October 1828.

Retiring from active service that month, Brown tries to remain neutral as civil war erupts in Argentina, but reluctantly accepts the post of governor of Buenos Aires under General Juan Lavalle from December 1828 to May 1829, when he resigns in disgust at government excesses. During 1829–37 he holds aloof from the despotic government of Juan Manuel de Rosas. After French and British encroachments on the region in the later 1830s, he offers to take charge of the navy again to protect national independence and is available to defend Argentine interests when war breaks out with a French-backed Uruguay in early 1841. Though exasperated by a long and “stupid war,” he blockades the Uruguayan navy effectively until French and British fleets intervene in July 1845 with overwhelming force to capture his squadron and bring the war to an end.

Idolised by the Argentinian population for his high-principled and humane advocacy of independent democracy, Brown passes his last years trading and farming a country estate. In late 1847, he journeys to Ireland, hoping to find relations in Mayo, and is shocked by the hunger and destitution of the Great Famine.

Brown dies on March 3, 1857, at his home in Buenos Aires and is buried with full military honours. The Argentine government issues a comuniqué: “With a life of permanent service to the national wars that our homeland has fought since its independence, William Brown symbolized the naval glory of the Argentine Republic.” During his burial, General Bartolomé Mitre famously says: “Brown in his lifetime, standing on the quarterdeck of his ship, was worth a fleet to us.” His grave is currently located in the La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.


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Birth of William Pirrie, 1st Viscount Pirrie

William James Pirrie, 1st Viscount Pirrie, KP, PC, PC (Ire), a leading British shipbuilder and businessman, is born on May 31, 1847, in Quebec City, Canada East, Province of Canada. He is chairman of Harland & Wolff, shipbuilders, between 1895 and 1924, and also serves as Lord Mayor of Belfast between 1896 and 1898.

Pirrie is taken back to Ireland when he is two years old and spends his childhood at Conlig House, also known as Little Clandeboye Conlig, County Down. Belonging to a prominent family, his nephews included J. M. Andrews, who later becomes Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Thomas Andrews, builder of RMS Titanic, and Sir James Andrews, 1st Baronet, the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland.

Pirrie is educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution before entering Harland & Wolff shipyard as a gentleman apprentice in 1862. Twelve years later he is made a partner in the firm, and on the death of Sir Edward Harland in 1895, he becomes its chairman, a position he holds until his death. As well as overseeing the world’s largest shipyard, he is elected Lord Mayor of Belfast in 1896, and is re-elected to the office as well as made an Irish Privy Counsellor the following year. He becomes Belfast’s first honorary freeman in 1898, and serves in the same year as High Sheriff of Antrim and subsequently of County Down. In February 1900, he is elected President of the UK Chamber of Shipping, where he had been vice-president the previous year. He helps finance the Liberals in Ulster in the 1906 United Kingdom general election, and that same year, at the height of Harland & Wolff’s success, he is raised to the peerage as Baron Pirrie, of the City of Belfast.

In 1907, Pirrie is appointed Comptroller of the Household to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and in 1908 is appointed Knight of St Patrick (KP). Pro-Chancellor of Queen’s University of Belfast (QUB) from 1908 to 1914, he is also in the years before World War I a member of the Committee on Irish Finance as well as Lord Lieutenant of Belfast.

In February 1912, after chairing a famous meeting of the Ulster Liberal Association at which Winston Churchill defends the government’s policy of Home Rule for Ireland, Pirrie is jeered on the streets of Belfast, and assaulted as he boards a steamer in Larne: pelted with rotten eggs, herrings, and bags of flour. In 1910, the Ulster Liberal Association, an overwhelmingly Protestant body, with a weekly newspaper, and branch network throughout Ulster, adopts (in opposition to the Ulster Liberal Unionist Association) an explicitly pro-home rule position.

In the months leading up to the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic, Pirrie is questioned about the number of life boats aboard the Olympic-class ocean liners. He responds that the great ships are unsinkable and the rafts are to save others. This haunts him for the rest of his life. In April 1912, Pirrie is to travel aboard RMS Titanic, but illness prevents him.

During the war Pirrie is a member of the War Office Supply Board, and in 1918 becomes Comptroller-General of Merchant Shipbuilding, organising British production of merchant ships.

In 1921, Pirrie is elected to the Senate of Northern Ireland, and that same year is created Viscount Pirrie of the City of Belfast, in the honours for the opening of the Parliament of Northern Ireland in July 1921, for his war work and charity work. In Belfast he is, on other grounds, already a controversial figure: a Protestant employer associated as a leading Liberal with a policy of Home Rule for Ireland.

In March 1924, Pirrie, his wife, and her sister sail on a Royal Mail Steam Packet Company liner from Southampton on a business trip to South America. They travel overland from Buenos Aires to Chile, where they embark aboard the Pacific Steam Navigation Company‘s Ebro. Pirrie comes down with pneumonia in Antofagasta, and his condition worsens when the ship reaches Iquique. At Panama City two nurses embark to care for him. By then he is very weak, but insists on being brought on deck to see the canal. He admires how Ebro is handled through the locks.

Pirrie dies at sea off Cuba on June 7, 1924. His body is embalmed. On June 13, Ebro reaches Pier 42 on the North River in New York City, where Pirrie’s friend Andrew Weir, 1st Baron Inverforth and his wife meet Viscountess Pirrie and her sister. UK ships in the port of New York lower their flags to half-mast, and Pirrie’s body is transferred to Pier 59, where it is embarked on White Star Line‘s RMS Olympic, one of the largest ships Pirrie ever built, to be repatriated to the UK. He is buried in Belfast City Cemetery. The barony and viscountcy die with him. Lady Pirrie dies on June 19, 1935. A memorial to Pirrie in the grounds of Belfast City Hall is unveiled in 2006.


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Birth of Fiona O’Malley, Former Irish Politician

Fiona O’Malley, Irish former politician, is born in Limerick, County Limerick, on January 19, 1968. She serves as a Senator from 2007 to 2011, after being nominated by the Taoiseach. She serves as a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dún Laoghaire constituency from 2002 to 2007.

O’Malley comes from a political family. Her father, Desmond O’Malley, is a former Fianna Fáil cabinet minister and founder of the Progressive Democrats. Her granduncle, Donogh O’Malley, is a Fianna Fáil minister in the 1960s. She is also a cousin of another former Progressive Democrats TD, Tim O’Malley.

A graduate of Trinity College Dublin and City, University of London, O’Malley works as an Arts Administrator before entering politics and as a personal assistant to Liz O’Donnell from 1998 to 2000. Her first political position is as elected member of the Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council from 1999. She is elected to Dáil Éireann for the Dún Laoghaire constituency at the 2002 Irish general election. She resigns her council seat in 2003 when the dual mandate comes into effect.

O’Malley is a member of the Oireachtas Committee on Arts, Sports and Tourism and the Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children. She is also a member of the Dáil All-Party group concerned with matters of sexual and reproductive health. She has traveled to South America and South Africa with the United Nations Population Fund and has spoken extensively of the need for a clear safe sex message both in Ireland and in the developing world.

O’Malley loses her Dáil seat at the 2007 Irish general election, but is nominated by the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, to the Seanad in August 2007. She is narrowly defeated in the race to become the leader of the Progressive Democrats by Ciarán Cannon.

O’Malley is an independent politician from the dissolution of the Progressive Democrats in 2009. She is an independent candidate at the 2011 Seanad election for the Dublin University constituency but is not elected.


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Death of Seán Lester, Last Secretary-General of the League of Nations

Seán Lester, Irish diplomat who is the last secretary-general of the League of Nations from August 31, 1940, to April 18, 1946, dies at Recess, County Galway, on June 13, 1959.

Lester is born on September 28, 1888, in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, as John Ernest Lester, the son of a Protestant grocer Robert Lester and his wife, the former Henrietta Ritchie. Although the town of Carrickfergus is strongly Unionist, he joins the Gaelic League as a youth and is won over to the cause of Irish nationalism. As a young man, he joins the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). He works as a journalist for the North Down Herald and a number of other northern papers before he moves to Dublin, where he finds a job at the Freeman’s Journal. By 1919, he has risen to its news editor.

After the Irish War of Independence, a number of Lester’s friends join the new government of the Irish Free State. He is offered and accepts the position as director of publicity.

Lester marries Elizabeth Ruth Tyrrell in 1920 by whom he has three daughters.

In 1923, Lester joins Ireland’s Department of External Affairs. He is sent to Geneva in 1929 to replace Michael MacWhite as Ireland’s Permanent Delegate to the League of Nations. In 1930, he succeeds in organising Ireland’s election to the Council (or executive body) of the League of Nations for three years. He often represents Ireland at Council meetings and stands in for the Minister for External Affairs. He becomes increasingly involved in the work of the League, particularly in its attempts to bring a resolution to two wars in South America. His work brings him to the attention of the League Secretariat and begins his transformation from national to international civil servant.

When Peru and Colombia have a dispute over a town in the headwaters of the Amazon River, Lester presides over the committee that finds an equitable solution. He also presides over the less-successful committee when Bolivia and Paraguay go to war over the Gran Chaco.

In 1933, Lester is seconded to the League’s Secretariat and sent to Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), as the League of Nations’ High Commissioner from 1934 to 1937. The Free City of Danzig is the scene of an emerging international crisis between Nazi Germany and the international community over the issue of the Polish Corridor and the Free City’s relationship with the Third Reich. He repeatedly protests to the German government over its persecution and discrimination of Jews and warns the League of the looming disaster for Europe. He is boycotted by the representatives of the German Reich and the representatives of the Nazi Party in Danzig.

Lester returns to Geneva in 1937 to become Deputy Secretary General of the League of Nations. In 1940, he becomes Secretary General of the body, becoming the League’s leader a year after the beginning of World War II which shows that the League has failed its primary purpose. The League has only 100 employees, including guards and janitors, out of the original 700.

Lester remains in Geneva throughout the war and keeps the League’s technical and humanitarian programs in limited operation for the duration of the war. In 1946, he oversees the League’s closure and turns over the League’s assets and functions to the newly established United Nations.

Lester is given the Woodrow Wilson Award in 1945 and a doctorate of the National University of Ireland (NUI) in 1948.

Despite rumours that he would be prepared to stand for election as President of Ireland, Lester seeks no permanent office and retires to Recess, County Galway, in the west of Ireland, where he dies on June 13, 1959. In its obituary, The Times describes him as an “international conciliator and courageous friend of refugees.”

In August 2010, a room in the Gdańsk City Hall, the building that had been Lester’s residence during his stay, is renamed by Mayor Paweł Adamowicz as the Seán Lester Room.

Lester’s granddaughter, Susan Denham, is Chief Justice of Ireland for the Supreme Court of Ireland from 2011 to 2017.


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Death of William Brown, Commander in the Argentine Navy

William Brown, Irish sailor, merchant, and naval commander who serves in the Argentine Navy during the wars of the early 19th century, dies in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 3, 1857. He is also known in Spanish as Guillermo Brown or Almirante Brown.

Brown is born on June 22, 1777, in Foxford, County Mayo. Comparatively little is known of his early life, and it has been suggested that he was illegitimate and took his mother’s surname and that his father’s surname was actually Gannon. He emigrates with his father to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1793, eventually settling in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A short time after their arrival, the friend who had invited them and offered them food and hospitality dies of yellow fever. Several days later, his father also succumbs to the same disease.

One morning, while Brown is wandering along the banks of the Delaware River, he meets the captain of a ship then moored in port. The captain inquires if he wants employment and Brown agrees. The captain engages him as a cabin boy, thereby setting him on the naval promotion ladder, where he works his way to the captaincy of a merchant ship. After ten years at sea, where he develops his skills as a sailor and reaches the rank of captain, Brown is press-ganged into a Royal Navy warship. British impressment of American sailors is one of the primary issues leading to the War of 1812.

During the Napoleonic Wars, Brown escapes the ship he is serving on, a galley, and scuttles the vessel. However, the French do not believe he had assisted them and imprison him in Lorient. On being transferred to Metz, he escapes, disguised in a French officer’s uniform. However, he is recaptured and is imprisoned in the fortress of Verdun. In 1809, he escapes from there in the company of a British Army officer named Clutchwell, and eventually reaches German territory.

Returning to England, Brown renounces his maritime career and on July 29, 1809, he marries Elizabeth Chitty, daughter of an English shipping magnate, in Kent. As he is a Catholic and she a Protestant, they agree to raise their sons as Catholics and their daughters as Protestants. Despite lengthy periods of enforced separation, they have nine children. He leaves the same year for the Río de la Plata on board Belmond and sets himself up as a merchant in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Late in 1811 Brown settles in Buenos Aires just as a criollo rebellion against Spanish colonial rule in Argentina is gaining strength. By April 1812, he is developing a coastal shipping business in fruit and hides. As the Spanish naval blockade of 1812–14 begins to choke trade, he is first commissioned by the patriot government as a privateer licensed to raid Spanish merchantmen, and then, on March 1, 1814, invited to take charge of a small rebel naval squadron to contest Spanish control of the Río de la Plata estuary. Leading a fleet of nineteen ships, he fixes with great speed on a set of wartime naval routines and signaling methods, and organises a system of discipline, founding the navy on principles that pay exceptional attention to the welfare of ordinary seamen.

In early March 1814, Brown shows personal courage and incisive skill in outwitting and defeating a more powerful Spanish force near Martín García Island, thereby dividing the Spanish blockade. A Spanish attempt in May 1814 to break his blockade of Montevideo is decisively crushed by him and his makeshift navy, and the Spanish strongholds on the Atlantic coast collapse, ending open war. In 1815 and 1816, however, he carries out skirmishing raids on military and commercial targets belonging to Spanish South American possessions, until detained by a British colonial governor in Barbados in July 1816 for alleged infringements of international rules of trade.

Illness, and a tortuous but ultimately successful appeal process, take up most of 1817–18, but when Brown returns to Argentina in October 1818, political enemies set in motion a prosecution for alleged disobedience of orders. Cashiered in August 1819, then restored in rank but forced to retire, he attempts suicide the following month. Convalescence and resumption of his trading concern occupies him for several years.

A repentant government renews Brown’s command of the navy in December 1825, when war breaks out with Brazil. Though vastly outnumbered by the Brazilian fleet, he shows audacity and great finesse in a number of successful engagements in the Plate estuary in 1826, roving up the Brazilian coast on occasion to create great confusion. In February 1827, he triumphs in a series of actions known as the Battle of Juncal. After another year of commercial privateering against the Brazilian merchant fleet, he is one of two delegates selected to sign peace terms with Brazil in October 1828.

Retiring from active service that month, Brown tries to remain neutral as civil war erupts in Argentina, but reluctantly accepts the post of governor of Buenos Aires under General Juan Lavalle from December 1828 to May 1829, when he resigns in disgust at government excesses. During 1829–37 he holds aloof from the despotic government of Juan Manuel de Rosas. After French and British encroachments on the region in the later 1830s, he offers to take charge of the navy again to protect national independence and is available to defend Argentine interests when war breaks out with a French-backed Uruguay in early 1841. Though exasperated by a long and “stupid war,” he blockades the Uruguayan navy effectively until French and British fleets intervene in July 1845 with overwhelming force to capture his squadron and bring the war to an end.

Idolised by the Argentinian population for his high-principled and humane advocacy of independent democracy, Brown passes his last years trading and farming a country estate. In late 1847, he journeys to Ireland, hoping to find relations in Mayo, and is shocked by the hunger and destitution of the Great Famine.

Brown dies on March 3, 1857, at his home in Buenos Aires and is buried with full military honours. The Argentine government issues a comuniqué: “With a life of permanent service to the national wars that our homeland has fought since its independence, William Brown symbolized the naval glory of the Argentine Republic.” During his burial, General Bartolomé Mitre famously says: “Brown in his lifetime, standing on the quarterdeck of his ship, was worth a fleet to us.” His grave is currently located in the La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.